These are the signs of a hurricane.
During its reign of terror,
a hurricane can release as much energy as
And guess what?
There are two of them.
And they're on a collision course.
Meet Dr. Sakuhei Fujiwhara,
the Japanese meteorologist
who first defined the interaction
between two hurricanes.
The Fujiwhara effect
describes what happens when
two whirling weather systems
called cyclonic vortexes,
come close to each other.
Cyclonic vortexes
could be hurricanes or typhoons.
And if they get within about
1,000 km (620 mi) of each other,
they can be even more dangerous.
It doesn't occur very often,
but it does happen.
And some scientists believe
that it will happen more often
as global temperatures continue to rise.
The term hurricane
gets its name from Huracan,
known in Mayan mythology
as a god of wind, storm, and fire.
And you're about to see why.
Hurricanes, or typhoons, form when
warm, moist air over the ocean rises,
and nearby air takes its place,
forming swirls of air.
As the warm, rising air cools,
it makes huge clouds filled with moisture.
These clouds continue to spin and expand,
causing intense rain, wind, and surging tides
wherever the storm goes.
Hurricanes can be extremely costly,
both in material damages and in human lives.
You might be looking up
at two approaching storms
and think to yourself,
"That can't be good."
And you'd be right.
But how bad things
are about to become for you
really depends on how big the storm is.
If two hurricanes
are about the same size and strength,
they'll do a “dance”
and orbit around a common center.
The result of this "dance"
might send both storms off
in different directions.
They could be catastrophic
for any city or region
that wasn’t prepared for a hurricane.
But if one of the hurricanes
is bigger than the other,
the larger one can absorb the smaller one.
This wouldn't create some kind of megastorm
like you see in the movies,
with astronomical wind speeds
and storm surges that wipe out whole cities.
But two hurricanes combined
could still make the hurricane
stronger and longer-lasting.
Hurricanes are the most deadly storms.
So increasing their strength
can have a massive impact on people’s lives,
on the economy,
and on healthcare systems
whenever they hit populated areas.
and that was only a category 3 storm.
A climatologist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Kerry Emmanuel,
believes that wind speeds in a hurricane
could increase by about 5%
for every 1°C (1.8°F) increase
in tropical ocean temperatures.
A category 5 storm has winds of
Will we one day have to
classify a category 6 storm?
Let's hope not.
But there are other reasons
why we should try to keep
the Earth's temperature from rising.
Do you know what would happen
if all the world's ice melted?
Well, that's a story for another WHAT IF.